Dear HCN,
Thanks for running Guy
Webster’s item on the Kanab ambersnail (HCN, 7/31/00: The snail
that stands like a dam). All too often “endangered species’ are
pegged as furry, feathered or scaly. There are lots more, all parts
of the big story, like the ambersnail. And it’s amazing just how
much mileage scientists have gotten from the discovery of this
little snail in the Grand Canyon. Guy only portrayed the proverbial
iceberg tip.
Science works in funny ways
sometimes. No one knew the snail was in the canyon until just nine
years ago. In fact, the genus to which it belongs, Oxyloma, wasn’t
even known to live in Arizona. All the more, the first specimens
collected at Vasey’s Paradise in Grand Canyon weren’t recognized as
ambersnails right away. I know, because I’m the one who made that
first collection in the canyon, in 1991.
Mollusks
aren’t terribly sexy, so they aren’t studied by too many
biologists. Virtually nothing was known about them in the Colorado
River corridor through Grand Canyon. The biggest collection
anywhere of mollusks from the canyon is in a museum in
Philadelphia, mostly collected in 1906 and 1910; but there’s
nothing from the river corridor.
So in 1991, I
went along on one of the Glen Canyon Environmental Studies research
trips studying the effects of flows from Glen Canyon Dam. I
prospected for snails. One of the “grab bags’ was from Vasey’s
Paradise; included among hundreds of specimens were a few
ambersnails. But the ambersnail can be mistaken for another kind of
land snail called Catinella, so it wasn’t real obvious at first –
especially since the ambersnail wasn’t supposed to be in
Arizona.
Back in Philadelphia, a colleague, Art
Bogan, looked at the anatomy of my snails in the grab bag from
Vasey’s. Right away we knew something was up, and one thing led to
another. Guy Webster’s article about transplanting new populations
out of harm’s way is the latest chapter in a long mission of Saving
Our Snails. Hardly a silly exercise, it’s one purpose of the
Endangered Species Act: to stabilize the well-being of endangered
and threatened organisms, to the point that their names can be
removed from the endangered lists.
The Kanab
ambersnail hangs by a thread on private land in Utah and in a tiny,
pristine locale in Grand Canyon, and nowhere else. We as an
environmentally conscious citizenry are obligated to address the
matter.
Earle
Spamer
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania
The writer works for the Academy of Natural Sciences, where, for many years, he was in the Department of Malacology (the study of mollusks).
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Mollusks run through it.
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